


Freak with a Knife Collection

by Canon_Is_Relative



Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF Women, Bill Harvelle was a good dad, Gen, Jo is awesome, POV Female Character, POV Jo, Season/Series 02, What are little girls made of, girls with knives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 12:38:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1899324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canon_Is_Relative/pseuds/Canon_Is_Relative
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She knows what she wants out of life, she knows how to get it, and she’s finally said to hell with everyone else -- I’m going for it. How many girls can say that?</p><p>How many <i>people</i> can say that, period?</p><p>---</p><p>Jo Harvelle prepares for her first solo hunt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Freak with a Knife Collection

She’s not stupid.

She knows the risks, she knows the odds. She knows she’s an amateur and she knows there’s a reason they don’t see many people over the age of forty pass through the Roadhouse.

She also knows what she wants out of life, she knows how to get it, and she’s finally said to hell with everyone else, I’m going for it. How many girls can say that?

How many _people_ can say that, period?

It’s a low-grade haunting, the kind of thing Sam and Dean probably phone in before breakfast. She chose it because it’s textbook and because it’s close to home if she turns out to be wrong. It’s her first time going solo and mad as her mom is, Jo knows she’s keeping her phone on and she’s got a bar full of hunters at her back if something happens. If Dean’s only beef with her hunting is the fact that she’s an amateur, fine. She’ll get experience and she’ll do it the smart way.

She’s not stupid, but she considers it a lucky break that she’s not. She is blonde, after all. She’s little, she’s got bright eyes and a killer smile. She’s been told she was pretty since before she could walk. 

Not by her dad, though. She never heard _pretty_ from dad. 

Dad came home from a hunt once to find mom had taught Jo to use a shotgun (“Damn ‘coons got into the cellar again, nasty ones,” mom shrugged by way of explanation). When she showed him how she could bullseye cans off the back fence and reload almost as fast as he could, he beamed at her the same way he had when she learned how to read and when she mastered her Latin conjugations; when she stood up to a bully and when she got the high score at pac-man. 

From dad she heard _smart,_ she heard _strong._ From dad she got questions: What she was thinking about? How was she feeling? She got praise when she figured something out on her own and help when she needed it, a hand up when she fell.

She lays his knife out on the table, last in a row of them. “Freak with a knife collection,” she murmurs, running her fingers over her blades. It feels good. _She_ feels good. Not like when she was trying to be normal, go to college, follow the Good Girl’s Guide to Life and only sneaking out her knives to shine and sharpen them when her roommate was out for the night. She’s not hiding anymore. She’s got a bead on a spirit that’s been torturing young women, and she’s going to end it tonight. No one else is going to suffer at its hands, and it’s going to be thanks to her.

And yes, she sees the pattern here. The HH Holmes case, the first in a long time to make her fight back against mom’s smothering hold on her, had sparked her passion because of the victims. Who they were. She’s not stupid, but fortunately most evil bitches are. Ghosts and spirits mostly aren’t so big on hiding their tracks and end up leaving signs any hunter with eyes can see. But there’s always gonna be the ones who are clever, or just plain lucky, or whose nature makes it difficult to catch on, to see the pattern before it’s too late. 

She’s a bartender after all, she’s been fending off wandering hands since before she knew what they wanted. And she went to college. She knows how to spot an easy mark. The young, the small, the lonely, the helpless. The only good thing she did when she was masquerading at that stupid school was to volunteer for the Student Safety Walk service, answering calls from helpless kids — okay, be real, from girls — who didn’t want to walk home alone at night. She’d heard some incredible stories from all types; from teenybopper sorority girls and butch lesbians and practical TAs and once, memorably, from one of her own professors who’d been drinking wine in her office and admitted to being afraid to cross her own campus at night alone. With her crackling walkie-talkie and the enormous flashlight that was more of a weapon than the boot knife she carried, Jo had been a beacon of light, of safety. They talked to her and she felt her heart harden by degrees at the lengths some people would go to put their fellow humans down alongside a kind of fierce joy to see how hard people were capable of fighting to keep their heads above water. When she dropped out of school, it was with the thought that nobody ever saved one single person with a business degree, and she went back to the Roadhouse, went back to putting together case files like the pro she is.

“Salt and silver, iron. A flask of holy water…” she sing-songs, the words mom and dad had taught her, a list of hunter’s tools put to the tune of a nursery rhyme to help her learn and remember. She thinks she’ll need to add another verse, to tack on the things she’s learned this last year or two. Cement truck, she wonders, what is possibly going to rhyme with _cement truck_?

She suits up, loads her weapons and goes over her notes one more time, flipping dad’s knife between her fingers until the clock strikes eleven and, if the son of a bitch sticks to his routine, it’s time. She kisses the handle of the knife and pockets it. She’s ready. 

_You know why I wanna do the job? For him. It’s my way of being close to him._ Not a lie. Not the whole truth, either. _It’s my way of saying thank you. My way of letting him know he did right by me._

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Theme = Independence. Supernatural, Jo Harvelle, her first solo hunt
> 
> Comment fic [originally posted here](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/537791.html?thread=76644031#t76644031)


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